Why CleverCrewConnect exists

My son was eight when he started playing ice hockey. Today, ten years and three clubs later, I am still not just a spectator at events, but usually also a helper behind the scenes. Along the way I have seen just about every method clubs use to organise their helper assignments — and kept running into the same weaknesses:

• Excel and Google spreadsheets that will not open on every device — or become unreadable on a phone.
• WhatsApp groups where important information drowns in the flood of messages and you scroll forever to find it again.
• In one of the clubs, my son had a fixed target of helper hours — and I kept asking myself: Is it met yet? Were all our assignments counted?
• In another club — with no fixed target at all — the board conversely hardly had a chance to keep track of who had helped, and how often.

Human memory is wonderful — but it simply is not made for precisely keeping track of hundreds of helper hours. And recording them by hand is an enormous effort.

It really hit home when I spent a season organising the helpers for the “Hüsli crew” myself, for every home game — penalty bench duty, game clock, match reporting. With lists and WhatsApp, of course. At some point I knew: there has to be a better way. But my research was sobering: decent tools do exist, yet they are often so expensive that they would blow a small club's budget. That was the moment a principle became clear to me that has shaped CleverCrewConnect ever since: Professional technology must not be a luxury for volunteer work.

So I started building something for myself. What began as a passion project in my spare time grew with every new idea — until it became clear that others could benefit from it too. That is how it turned into the CleverCrewConnect platform: free for clubs, funded solely by unobtrusive ads that cover part of my running costs. One thing I am well aware of: an app does not solve every problem — above all, it will not make more people volunteer. But it gives those who do something that makes their work easier: take on assignments with two taps, keep the overview, forget nothing.

And what do I get out of it? First and foremost, the joy of building it. I have put a lot of spare time and heart into this, without knowing where the journey leads. Whether CleverCrewConnect will succeed, I do not know — I hope so. Because I am convinced: volunteering is the backbone of our society, it will only become more important — and it deserves tools that save time instead of creating new bureaucracy. In the end, this is not about profit for me. It is about giving a tool to the people who give their time to keep our community running.

Questions or ideas? I would love to hear from you: support@clevercrewconnect.org